Study: Bypass surgery offers better results than tents - 13 WTHR Indianapolis

A new study shows if you have heart problems, you'll live longer with bypass surgery.

A local man says although the recovery time was longer, he doesn't have to go back to the doctor as often.

"When I would try to do my gardening, I couldn't till my garden, or I couldn't even dig with my shovel. I didn't really have the oomph or the gumption to do anything," said Brad Greenburg.

He's now able to get back into his garden and do what he loves. It's a welcome activity considering his family health history.

"My mom had a quadruple bypass. My dad he's had a quintuple. My mom's dad died of a heart attack and his dad died of a heart attack too," he explained.

And it wasn't long before Brad joined the list with his own set of heart problems.

"I was having a heart attack. I was with my son, we were out shopping and I started getting pains in my chest, and my arm started getting numb and I was like, Ben, we have to go home, I'm sick."

Brad had a series of stents put in. It was a procedure that was repeated every two to three years to alleviate the blockage.

But Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting, CAB, offers patients the same results with only one surgery and no repeated non-surgical procedures.

The National Institutes of Health-supported study compared CABG with a non-surgical procedure known as percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). While there were no survival differences between the two groups after one year, after four years the CABG group had a 21-percent lower mortality.

Dr. David Hormuth, an Indiana University Health Thoracic Surgeon, said, "The procedure is we'll actually open the breast bone. We'll put them on a bypass machine. We'll take the vein out of the leg for example or in the internal mammary artery. The way I do it is I will stop the heart, and then we'll find the area blockage and we'll go away from the blockage. We'll open up the coronary artery, sew a bypass graft on there so we can get blood supply around that blockage. Once those are all performed then the heart will start back up."

Now Brad's heart is better than ever.

"If I knew what I know now, I would {have} go ahead and done the bypass," he said.

He has more time to do more of what he loves.

"I still have lifting restrictions but I'm back to work full time and I'm working 9 hours no problem," he said.

See the study